Yasmin Temelli recently won the 2009 drupa Prize for her Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Between conformity and resistance – manifestations of feminine voices under General Porfirio Díaz. An analysis of six women’s publications”, which focuses on women’s literature and its social relevance on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. Yasmin Temelli is a graduate of the Department of Romance Languages at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf and the received award from Martin Weickenmeier, drupa 2012 President and Werner M. Dornscheidt, President and CEO of Messe Düsseldorf.

With her dissertation, Yasmin Temelli has tackled a particularly multifaceted and fascinating topic, covering the start of women’s emancipation and feminism during Mexico’s industrialization, freedom of the press under a dictatorship and publishing challenges at the beginning of the 20th century. She was the first researcher to systematically investigate the literary journals published especially with female readers in mind at the archives and libraries in Mexico City, the southern U.S. and the Ibero-American Institute (IAI) in Berlin. She narrowed the focus by concentrating on the over 30-year-long (1876–1910) dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz. Yasmin Temelli’s thesis will soon appear in the MEDIAmericana series produced by the prestigious Frankfurt publishing house Vervuert.

About the drupa Prize

Since 1978, Messe Düsseldorf, the organizer of drupa, has paid tribute to outstanding academic achievement Düsseldorf’s Heinrich Heine University with a monetary award of Euro 6,000 to facilitate the publication and distribution of the winning dissertation. Each year, a specialist jury consisting of the President and Vice-President of the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, the drupa President and the President and CEO of Messe Düsseldorf selects the winning dissertation.

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